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New KDE Desktop! Version 4.5 not perfect, but much better!

So of course, while I’m spending a glorious and relaxing week hanging out in Boulder, Colorado, the KDE community is working overtime fixing a few showstopper bugs. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Collection (also known as KDE SC) was released Tuesday, a week late from the original release plan, but it looks like a pretty good one.

Boot time seems faster than it’s been. Haven’t clocked it, but login-to-start-working may take half the time it did in v4.4.x

The external device notifier now appears by default in the main panel when there’s something in the USB port.

The infernal announcement that Akonadi is installing its front end on every boot has finally gone away!

Yet, it is still a dot-zero release, and some weirdness has been puzzling me:

Since I reset four of my virtual desktops with different wallpapers, an empty box appears in the upper left corner of the screen on boot. Clicking X makes the panel, and all the wallpapers, disappear. Logging out solves the problem, but I’m sure something short of that will fix it.

One time I rendered my mouse unusable by apparently activating a gesture (I think) that added a plus sign to the cursor. No combination of clicks restored mouse functioning, and a again I had to logout/login (thankfully I could get KRunner to run logout!) to get back to normal.

More research required, but if anyone has an idea, I’m all ears.

Meanwhile, if you want to try KDE 4.5, instructions for some of the leading distros can be found here (thanks to Planet KDE):

The only bad things about KDE4.5 in openSUSE 11.3 is that they will change the KDE factory repositories (4.5) to the next 4.6 version so we have to choose in to downgrade back to 4.4 or keep that unstable KDE repository.

The issue with activities is normal if you come from KDE 4.4. SC 4.5 really fixed a lot of Activities use cases, but the massive fixes came out at the cost of new migration bugs. Here’s how you fix this, once and for all.

1. Click on the cashew, select “Activities”.
2. You’ll see various activities. Delete all of them, except one.
3. If you use one activity per virtual desktop, disable the feature and enable it again. Same thing if you use a separate Dashboard: disable and enable it again.
4. Rebuild freely your desktop.

After this, you’ll never have issues with activities, like those you’ve seen.